Johnny Legend....I can hardly get my mouth to wrap around even the words anymore. One night with the infamous embodiment of pop culture's leftovers and warped recalls and I was stunned into near speechlessness. This man is, in a word, HUGE. His life has spanned the length of rock'n'roll and his experience the breadth. An hour with him and you've heard unheard of stories about everyone from Elvis through the Fleetwood Mac/Beached Boys years to Debbie Harry. And eventually, unfailingly, there's Courtney Love! This man is a veritable repository of pop culture TRASH, and as we people of taste know, that's where all the good stuff is anyway!

For those of you who haven't met the man, Johnny Legend is perhaps first and foremost a rockabilly rebel. He's fronted rockabilly bands since he was a punk at Simi Valley High School in San Fernando, California, including, most famously, the Rockabilly Rebels. The Rebels have been around for over twenty years now and have toured the world with their demented stage show and Real Rock'n'Roll music. They recruit pretty girls to go-go dance at every show, and Johnny's got a way with those girls. Legend-arily, one long-celibate girl attacked him, and he had to perform his smokin' grooves on his back with his face pinned beneath her pelvis!! In Portland, I witnessed him playing harmonica while absolutely buried in my stripper-buddy's luscious butt! What a guy!!!

A true renaissance man after my own heart, Johnny's other famous incarnations include actor,

film producer, music producer, porn star, composer for obscure Oriental porn scores, and incredibly strange wrestler. Yet somehow he remains, according to his close friend and biographer, the most stand-up guy in the states, the purest punk in SoCal.

Johnny starred in 1971's Pot, Parents, and Police, an "awful shockumentary about a boy who stumbles down the road to ruin with the help of a marijuana cigarette." Then he made a few porno flicks that even his mother would be proud of. His clothed films include the 1981 cult classic My Breakfast with Blassie, which features Andy Kaufmann (in his last film) discussing topics such as toilet hygiene and wrestling with women with wrestling champ Classy Freddie Blassie. Blassie also helped Johnny on his hit tune "Pencil Necked Geek." Johnny's a Hollywood roustabout and awful good-looking, so he's naturally got a number of movie star stories to spice his abundant name-dropping of the richest and most famous musicians.

I had to settle for Hung Far Low, where my half-hour interview turned into three hours and I still hadn't managed to weasel in any of my de riguer questions. Oh well, Oh hell. In retrospect, my only mistake was to ask Johnny to brief me on the gory details of his history. A fine way to start out an interview with a Legend, but only if you have a year to transcribe it!

For instance, when I asked Johnny if he'd ever crossed paths with Mr. Bob Dylan, he of course had, and proceeded to tell me a story that involved ten angry Samoans, Elvis impersonators, the Traveling Wilburys, a sumo wrestler, two cast mixups both resulting in cushy extra parts for Johnny, twenty young hoofers who just got kicked off the cast of Fame, thirty elderly folk in wheel chairs, a revelation that Johnny was into dance and tumble all through the seventies with famous

Everywhere, in every time, Johnny Legend has been there, done that. He is the X factor, the strange glue underpinning our goofy culture. The man is huge. Unstoppable. The mack truck of mack daddies. An ideal conversation with such a legend would be sleep-over style, with a bevy of scantily-clad babes ooohing and aahhing at the incredible diversity of this dude's non-stop fabulousness! Me,

hoofers from the forties, which brought up Jayne Mansfield, Marilyn Monroe, etc, etc. All Dylan had to do was be carried in by Samoan bodyguards (also friends of Johnny's) and be propped up on his spot. Oh, Bobby... Asked if he'd ever met Dylan, Johnny says, "I've never actually met the guy. I've only stood close to his carcass."

Here's your revelatory interview, folks. "DUDE" and "CHIC" are this mysterious couple that shows up at only the coolest of rock shows. I first met them